Jul 26, 2018

Review: Lenovo’s Google Smart Display is pretty and intelligent

Smart speakers have come a long way over the past few years as Amazon,
Google and Apple have delivered pretty noteworthy strides in the IQs of
their assistants. Where speakers haven’t advanced as much is in how they
offer users choices; Google Assistant can only list out so many options
before you get sick of listening, so throwing a screen onto these
devices was a pretty inevitable evolution.
At CES earlier this year, Google showcased what it called Smart
Displays, basically an answer to Amazon’s Echo Show. Today, Lenovo’s
device, the first of the bunch, goes on sale.

The device, to be clear, pretty much just looks like an Android tablet
that you plug in with Google Assistant on it. What’s interesting is how
the device handles visual feedback for audio commands, giving
lightweight visual context for some queries and more robust video/photo
content for others. Google clearly doesn’t have all of the core tenets
of its Smart Display interface philosophy hammered out, and yet for the
most part this is a very pleasant product that strikes all of the right
notes on design.
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The device comes in two flavors, a $249 10-inch 1080p version and a $199
8-inch 720p version. There aren’t any differences beyond the screen
size, so it really depends on where you’re keeping it. I’d imagine that
people who are putting something like this on their nightstand as a
way-too-smart alarm clock might want the smaller version, whereas if you
have a bit more room in your kitchen or living room the 10-inch version
might offer some needed screen real estate. For this review I tested
the 10-inch $249 variant.

While I didn’t have too many qualms with the hardware, it was much
easier to pick out things that bothered me about the way Google has
approached the Smart Display software. While some tasks were
refreshingly thought out, like searching for and progressing through
recipe instructions, others, like finding a specific YouTube video, were
frustratingly difficult.
The Smart Display is fundamentally a Google Home device that can also
communicate to you through visuals. It may look like a tablet with a
speaker, but you will not find anything resembling a full app on the
device, you will not be entering text via an onscreen keyboard and you
certainly will never see a “menu” button. This is a tablet with an
identity crisis, a product that can use certain functionality to
communicate with you but also wants you to speak with your words and let
its AI prowess do the more stringent work of telling you what you
would like.
Asking the device to “open YouTube” will take you to a screen with a
list of recommended videos and… nothing else. Fair enough, everything is
sparsely simple, but it’s frankly a little annoying to wander through
voice commands to navigate to something right in front of you that you
know you could tap toward much more quickly. This is one of the key
advantages that the Smart Display holds over the Amazon Echo Show, so I
just feel like they should have been a little bit more heavy-handed in
porting a fuller version of the app.

The onscreen content is more often than not just an added perk; for more
informational queries it can be useful to see what a person looks like
if you’re asking Google who they are, and it can be useful to see a
five-day weather forecast rather than having Alexa list all of the days
out. For the most part, it seems less than necessary, and I rarely found
myself actually looking at the screen after I had asked a question.
Google has been doing some work in stringing commands together or adding
support for follow-up questions in some contexts, but with a screen
that can now show you the device is still listening I wish the company
just kept the mic running during certain situations. When you’re
progressing through the steps of a recipe, for instance, each time you
have to keep repeating “Hey Google, next!” (you can also tap an onscreen
button but that’s not always ideal when deep in cooking).

Some of these features could use updates, but there are other things
that Google has nailed, right out of the box. Routines are great on the
Smart Display. Saying,”Hey Google, good morning,” will turn on my
lights, tell me about my meetings for the day, showcase the weather and
my commute and give a nice little rundown of the news. This was all
possible on my display-less Google Home already, but something about
doing this on the Smart Display just feels much more Jarvis-like, à la
Tony Stark, and I feel like I’m living in a fairly cool future, as long
as I cut off the news headlines in time.

Let’s take a closer look at the hardware, though, because Lenovo has
actually built a very thoughtful product, and I must say it’s been a
little bit since I’ve been wowed by consumer hardware coming from them.
More often than not, Lenovo gear seems to occupy that area where it’s
mostly quite good but one or two things are off and the whole thing just
feels second-tier as a result. Their Smart Display, on the other hand,
is beautiful and, honestly, much better-looking than any Home product
that Google has shipped.
Sound-wise, this speaker is also much better than I was expecting for
its small footprint. It seems louder and crisper than the standard
Google Home, falling short of those metrics when compared to the pricier
Max, though you are also certainly getting less speaker for your money
than a comparably priced (but screen-less) product like the Sonos One.
Both JBL and LG also have smart display products in the pipeline that
seem to place more of an emphasis on powerful sound, but the whole
boombox look that they have going just doesn’t do it for me.

There were a couple of hardware quirks with Lenovo’s Smart Display, but
really nothing major. I wasn’t generally getting the greatest viewing
angle from the device on my kitchen counter, so some sort of hinge on
the stand would have been nice to adjust the angle of the screen. The
device’s ability to be viewable in both portrait and landscape was
interesting, but you can really only use it in portrait for Duo calls as
Google doesn’t really seem to want the Smart Display to be used in that
orientation. The touchscreen was also at times a little less responsive
than I would have liked, but fared well enough by and large.

Lenovo’s Smart Display is very pretty and offers some great value as
well as some interesting ideas from Google. It strangely doesn’t feel
like a huge upgrade over its screen-less Google Home variants,
especially because navigating videos is still a bit harder than it
should be, but with pretty decent sound and a few nice visual feedback
features there are some very novel ideas present even if they don’t feel
entirely fleshed out.
Lucas Matney